A few comments on your thoughtful piece about the UK and French elections and electoral systems. For the UK, it is clear, as you state, that PR would have led to a better outcome. A result in seats reflecting the actual support of the parties would have produced not only a more representative, but also more legitimate government to face the country’s profound challenges. Starmer ran a Labour campaign which took advantage of anti-Tory feeling and avoided any controversial commitments. It excited no one, leaving British cynicism toward politicians in place. With its landslide of seats with only a third of the votes (and high abstention) Labour will face a sophisticated media seeking to fill the role of an effectively absent opposition. Meanwhile Starmer will have to deal with an oversized caucus with many ambitious politicians excluded from the cabinet. In sum, a very short honeymoon.
France is a different story. After the instability that reigned during the fourth Republic in the postwar period, the second ballot system replaced PR. Such a system allows the French to express themselves – “let off steam” - and then go about voting practically, so that an actual workable government can be formed. The first ballot gives the various minor/fringe parties a legitimate place inside the system but the second ballot in presidential and national legislative elections is designed to prevent them from acting as spoilers when a government is formed. (This is achieved in regional and local elections under PR though a mechanism which gives the largest party half the seats plus one.) Since instituted in 1962, the system worked as expected in the large majority of elections.
In my visits to France, I asked my colleagues why France had not adopted proportional representation, like its European neighbors. PR can only work, I was told almost invariably, in Protestant countries where compromise is natural. Any single vote system, especially PR, they added, misses this essential “letting off steam” aspect of their two-vote system. (They tried PR once, in 1981, and immediately went back to the current system.)
I could see this cultural difference reflected in the rhetoric of the representatives from France and other Catholic southern European countries compared to those from Protestant Northern Europe when I was an observer at a meeting of the Socialist International. “Just because a proposal that fits our principles is impractical is no reason not to demand it” said the former, leaving the latter shaking their heads.
Similarly, while the Dutch rejection of the proposed EU constitution in the 2005 referendum three days earlier was an assertion that the EU was moving too fast toward a superstate that could hurt Dutch national interests, in France, the NON won 55% with arguments that often sounded more pro-Europe than the OUI. Thousands of posters and hundreds of op-eds proclaimed: “Oui à l’Union; non à la Constitution.”
The NON won despite the fact that the Chirac government, along with business, the left-wing national papers, Le Monde and Libération as well as the majority among the Socialists, trade unionists, environmentalists, and feminists were in favor. Elsewhere, the proponents of the OUI would and should have dominated the airwaves. But not in France, where the electronic media gave equal time to both sides so as not to be accused of being biased in favor of the establishment. I listened every evening as NON’s defenders, few of which had any position in government or expectation of having one, placed their establishment opponents on the defensive, having to respond to sweeping condemnations of a complex document of 448 articles. My sense was that had they been given a second chance, a majority would have voted in favor of the flawed constitution as superior to the status quo once having been able to voice their concerns about its flaws.
The Spring 2005 debate was “déjà vu all over again”, bringing me back to 2002 as I watched the televised presidential election debates from my Grenoble apartment. Every night, one of the 15 candidates was courteously interviewed. Never were any of the extreme left/fringe candidates asked about how their plans differed from the discredited state-socialists of Eastern Europe.
In the first round, these various fringe candidates took enough votes from Socialist Party candidate Lionel Jospin so that the far-right candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, placed second after Jacques Chirac. I then watched the Grenoble students, who had been passive in the first round, mobilize for the second ballot to easily elect a right-wing presidential candidate to keep a further-right one out.
The recent parliamentary election took place in a France more divided than it was then. Had it taken place under PR, the result would have reflected voters’ overall preferences as far as their preferred party is concerned. But only in a two-party system like in the US, or a two party coalition system like in Sweden would their vote for their preferred party (A) at the same time constitute a vote against the party (B) that they want to keep out of power. In the case of France today, for many voters, as we know, it is the effect of their vote on B (LePen’s RN) that is the most salient. That’s what the second vote allows.
No doubt RN supporters were disappointed with the second vote outcome, yet the party – or any other party – did not question its legitimacy.
The fact that electoral alliances were formed for the second ballot this time may mean that one can envisage a future transformation of France’s political culture into one like in Scandinavia, but given that these were negative alliances to keep a party out more than anything else, one would have a hard time convincing informed French observers that it is worth the risk that PR would entail.
It won’t be easy to arrive at a compromise to form a government this time, given the tendency of French politicians to grandstand publicly based on principle (even while negotiating behind the scenes). But had the election been fought under single vote PR, it would be that much harder.
Hello Steven,
A few comments on your thoughtful piece about the UK and French elections and electoral systems. For the UK, it is clear, as you state, that PR would have led to a better outcome. A result in seats reflecting the actual support of the parties would have produced not only a more representative, but also more legitimate government to face the country’s profound challenges. Starmer ran a Labour campaign which took advantage of anti-Tory feeling and avoided any controversial commitments. It excited no one, leaving British cynicism toward politicians in place. With its landslide of seats with only a third of the votes (and high abstention) Labour will face a sophisticated media seeking to fill the role of an effectively absent opposition. Meanwhile Starmer will have to deal with an oversized caucus with many ambitious politicians excluded from the cabinet. In sum, a very short honeymoon.
France is a different story. After the instability that reigned during the fourth Republic in the postwar period, the second ballot system replaced PR. Such a system allows the French to express themselves – “let off steam” - and then go about voting practically, so that an actual workable government can be formed. The first ballot gives the various minor/fringe parties a legitimate place inside the system but the second ballot in presidential and national legislative elections is designed to prevent them from acting as spoilers when a government is formed. (This is achieved in regional and local elections under PR though a mechanism which gives the largest party half the seats plus one.) Since instituted in 1962, the system worked as expected in the large majority of elections.
In my visits to France, I asked my colleagues why France had not adopted proportional representation, like its European neighbors. PR can only work, I was told almost invariably, in Protestant countries where compromise is natural. Any single vote system, especially PR, they added, misses this essential “letting off steam” aspect of their two-vote system. (They tried PR once, in 1981, and immediately went back to the current system.)
I could see this cultural difference reflected in the rhetoric of the representatives from France and other Catholic southern European countries compared to those from Protestant Northern Europe when I was an observer at a meeting of the Socialist International. “Just because a proposal that fits our principles is impractical is no reason not to demand it” said the former, leaving the latter shaking their heads.
Similarly, while the Dutch rejection of the proposed EU constitution in the 2005 referendum three days earlier was an assertion that the EU was moving too fast toward a superstate that could hurt Dutch national interests, in France, the NON won 55% with arguments that often sounded more pro-Europe than the OUI. Thousands of posters and hundreds of op-eds proclaimed: “Oui à l’Union; non à la Constitution.”
The NON won despite the fact that the Chirac government, along with business, the left-wing national papers, Le Monde and Libération as well as the majority among the Socialists, trade unionists, environmentalists, and feminists were in favor. Elsewhere, the proponents of the OUI would and should have dominated the airwaves. But not in France, where the electronic media gave equal time to both sides so as not to be accused of being biased in favor of the establishment. I listened every evening as NON’s defenders, few of which had any position in government or expectation of having one, placed their establishment opponents on the defensive, having to respond to sweeping condemnations of a complex document of 448 articles. My sense was that had they been given a second chance, a majority would have voted in favor of the flawed constitution as superior to the status quo once having been able to voice their concerns about its flaws.
The Spring 2005 debate was “déjà vu all over again”, bringing me back to 2002 as I watched the televised presidential election debates from my Grenoble apartment. Every night, one of the 15 candidates was courteously interviewed. Never were any of the extreme left/fringe candidates asked about how their plans differed from the discredited state-socialists of Eastern Europe.
In the first round, these various fringe candidates took enough votes from Socialist Party candidate Lionel Jospin so that the far-right candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, placed second after Jacques Chirac. I then watched the Grenoble students, who had been passive in the first round, mobilize for the second ballot to easily elect a right-wing presidential candidate to keep a further-right one out.
The recent parliamentary election took place in a France more divided than it was then. Had it taken place under PR, the result would have reflected voters’ overall preferences as far as their preferred party is concerned. But only in a two-party system like in the US, or a two party coalition system like in Sweden would their vote for their preferred party (A) at the same time constitute a vote against the party (B) that they want to keep out of power. In the case of France today, for many voters, as we know, it is the effect of their vote on B (LePen’s RN) that is the most salient. That’s what the second vote allows.
No doubt RN supporters were disappointed with the second vote outcome, yet the party – or any other party – did not question its legitimacy.
The fact that electoral alliances were formed for the second ballot this time may mean that one can envisage a future transformation of France’s political culture into one like in Scandinavia, but given that these were negative alliances to keep a party out more than anything else, one would have a hard time convincing informed French observers that it is worth the risk that PR would entail.
It won’t be easy to arrive at a compromise to form a government this time, given the tendency of French politicians to grandstand publicly based on principle (even while negotiating behind the scenes). But had the election been fought under single vote PR, it would be that much harder.